Not needed. The Toyota work "is" the needed replication of the Mitsubishi work. More confirmations would be "nice" but this is the essential validation of the earlier work.
And you are remembering correctly that Toyota did set up P & F in a laboratory in France with good equipment and funding. Unfortunately, that was done at the behest of the chairman of Toyota, and when he died, support from Toyota waned. But P&F did, at that laboratory and time period, replicate and extend their earlier work from Utah. Not much was published involving the mechanisms (Toyota and the trade secret meme), but they DID publish proof that their original calorimetry and excess heat measurements from Utah were correct.
Yes indeed. I should have read the article before I posted!
This is mighty exciting news.
If LENR can be developed as an energy source (as seems inevitable) I wonder what OPEC will do? "Go Nova" (raise prices in a last attempt to raid the cookie jar before imploding utterly) or try to do "the long fade" by cutting prices to keep research funds away from LENR alternatives.
The problem (for them) is that the environmental movement (which they've funded, nurtured and encouraged) is going to keep going either way, and that hurts them too.
This is great news, truly great.